All of the above specs are from the actual tags at Best Buy. My friend plans on using it for her child who is in High School, but also for digital pictures and maybe video. If someone could help me out in deciding, I would be greatly appreciative.

ThreeOnTheTree

New Member

That Gateway model is very similar to mine. I like it for the most part. You will only get about 2 hours on a battery, but otherwise it's a very powerful machine, and the screen is very nice with many brightness levels. If you're not really looking for mobility, then I think it would work out for you.

Hoyle

New Member

Well, neither is very mobile. I think the Toshiba has two advanatages: Larger Screen, and lower TDP CPU.

I think the Gateway has a faster CPU, and probably much better video card. And XP home is probably preferable to MCE.

Given the size of these screens, and the heft of these notebooks, they'll have large batteries anyway, and I doubt the battery life difference will be significant. I think for the price I'd probably go with the Gateway (they have excellent built quality lately, by the way), especially if I was going to game or do professional 3-D applications where the nice GPU and faster CPU would be helpful, but the huge screen on the Toshiba is tempting.

ThreeOnTheTree

New Member

Yeah, the X600 Mobility is basically the same as the old Radeon 9600 pro, but with the PCIe interface. The Athlon64 4000+ should be a 2.6ghz 1mb core on the 90nm process. It's a power hog compared to the PM, as it's a 62W CPU. That's not bad considering the clock speed.

And ditto on the quality of Gateway notebooks. The one I'm using is very well made and very accessable to upgrades, including the CPU.

Hoyle

New Member

Yeah, the X600 Mobility is basically the same as the old Radeon 9600 pro, but with the PCIe interface. The Athlon64 4000+ should be a 2.6ghz 1mb core on the 90nm process. It's a power hog compared to the PM, as it's a 62W CPU. That's not bad considering the clock speed.

True, but it wouldn't be so bad under typical moderate loads. My 3000+ (130nm) was getting ~4 hrs of battery life (the battery is 20 months old now, alas) with moderate use due to Q&C/performance scaling, even while it only got 90mins if you pegged it at 100% the whole time.

ThreeOnTheTree

New Member

Every try RMclock on your 3000+? It works pretty well these days, if you don't mind it running in the system tray. I've got it working on a Turion MT32 (replaced a 3700+), and my P-states are 800mhz @ .8v and 1800mhz @ 1.15v. Unfortunately, I only got an extra 30 minutes of battery life out of the deal. This suggests that ATI's chipset (at least the one in this machine) doesn't really save much energy.

Hoyle

New Member

Yeah, I did try a more updated version not long ago. Seems like maybe my NF3 was a little too early for it. I can run it, and it appears to be working, but a number of CAD and other computationally intensive apps crash out eventually. At this point, I could probably double my battery life by buying a new battery!

As far as your machine, I have a suspicion that @1.1v a Turion uses only a few watts, and at .8v, it uses less, but that the difference gets mostly washed out by the background overhead. I think you're probably seeing most of the saving when the chip it maxed out.

ThreeOnTheTree

New Member

Yeah, and you can't go any lower than .8v. Oh well. ****s that RMclock doesn't work for you. I've found it to be as seamless as Powernow drivers. I wonder if it's the chipset or something else? It's not like ATI's mobily chipset is that great either.

Hoyle

New Member

Not sure, really. Like I said, it FUNCTIONS allright, but it almost seems like on this machine when load is suddenly applied the multiplier change goes through slightly AHEAD of the Vcore change. It actually works if I make a [email protected] and a [email protected] set of states (which DOES knock down max TDP, since this chip is 1.4v stock... it's never had any problem running [email protected], though). But if I try something like changing the lower Pstate to [email protected] (MORE than enough), it will run fine until it tries to switch to 1.8 Ghz... and then BSOD, artifacts, solid lock... all makes me think it's trying to run [email protected] which this chip cannot do.

ThreeOnTheTree

New Member

Maybe you should add a few intermediate P-states? It might help ramp up the VID a little faster. Once you define the high and low P-states, it can automatically determine the rest of the VIDs. Could be you just need a newer version of the program, or have you already tried that? I just like it because it reduces the amount of fan spinup.